Frank Lucas

Frank Lucas (9 September 1930-) was an African-American drug trafficker who operated in Harlem, New York City during the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Lucas cut out middlemen by buying heroin directly from Southeast Asia, and he smuggled drugs into the United States by hiding them in pallets underneath the coffins of dead American servicemen.

Biography
Frank Lucas was born in La Grange, North Carolina on 9 September 1930, and his 12-year-old cousin's murder by the Ku Klux Klan for looking at a Caucasian woman in Greensboro led to Lucas embarking on a life of crime. He drifted through a life of petty crime before fleeing to New York City on the advice of his mother, and he indulged in petty crime and pool hustling in Harlem before being taken under the wing of the gangster Bumpy Johnson. Lucas worked as Johnson's driver and right-hand man, and he took over Johnson's organization after he died of congestive heart failure in 1968. Lucas made it a point to only trust relatives and close friends from North Carolina to handle his various heroin operations, smuggling 98%-100% pure heroin from Southeast Asia into the United States in the coffins of dead US Army soldiers who were killed during the Vietnam War. Lucas bought property in Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, and North Carolina, and he rubbed shoulders with the elite of the entertainment, politics, and crime worlds. In January 1975, he was arrested at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey, and he was sentenced to 70 years in prison. Lucas was released from prison in 1991.